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Priscilla     It's surprisingly simple, going back to a purified Zone. Despite the massive speculating and general uneasy misgiving towards what would become of them, floating in the susurrus of disembodied whispering and patterns in the blackness outside space, you find that their pinpricks of light haven't faded in the slightest. You still have the LEO and CANCER cards, so entering them is the same as usual. The harsh electric sound and weightless transition is even exactly the same, to the point you might even feel as though what's on the other side (inside?) wouldn't have changed either.

    That isn't the case. As soon as the Nothingness dissolves (is pushed outside?) behind you, you're hit with several seconds of adjusting to the near-blinding whiteness. When it your eyes focus and the reflected light fades, you are confronted with a landscape that is, structurally, no different than when you had left, but so perfectly white that a hospital clean room would be hard pressed to match it.

    The constant, faint taste of smoke and fumes that is endemic to Zone 1's perpetually smoggy, overcast, plastic-raining atmosphere is conspicuously absent. Your first breath in is clean and crisp, like brisk outdoors air, without the feeling of being recycled endlessly through a dust-choked vent. The rain has completely stopped, revealing a sky that is white with diffused light, as if the sun is shining through a thick layer of mist far up above. Dark clouds move quickly towards the horizon, scrolling with some high altitude wind, but they just look like clouds, not plumes of smoke.

    The gentle lapping of waves has a different quality too. It splishes and splashes, rather than slopping and sloshing against the metal edges of land. The sea is not white plastic, but a dark, semitranslucent hue, contrasting the pale land. It's the kind of dark that comes from deep water that isn't deep enough to scatter light into blue, over a dark bottom surface --that sort of near-black of rock pools and wells.

    There are no signs of life. Not really, anyways. The tram station is still in the same place it was before, but the sign overhead no longer declares the name of the stop, instead having been replaced with a series of size72 ???????. The tram itself is nowhere to be found, but that *may* just be because it's still where you left it, in Alma. The rails still run the same circuit and probably lead to the same places, but there are no convenient vehicles on them.
Starbound Flotilla     The clear, open air somehow seems to resist the smoke that George puts out. His cigarette presumably smells like a hospital, but it's hard to pick up the scent. He's sitting at the edge of the rail station, legs unwisely over the edge, just taking in the sights. He didn't follow them through the door, he was just here to begin with. Sitting and waiting. Enjoying the sights and the silence the way that an only old men can, peacefully. He'd probably fish, if he could.

    "It's a relief, isn't it?"
Tina Natsumi Tina should be rather wary coming into the purified Zone, considering what had attacked the crew the last time a portal was opened into it. Although the wounds have mostly healed over by now, the phantom pains and memory haven't left the girl's head just yet.

It's not enough to stop her from coming here, anyway, but still enough to keep her on her toes as she wanders around the tram station slowly. "It doesn't suck as much to breathe here, that's for sure. Still creepy as all heck, though." She comments idly to George while tipping her hat back, squinting at the white everywhere before slipping on a pair of shades just to neutralize it a little. "Y'think we're gonna run into anything killy and angry out here?"
Janine Liberi     Janine has far too many experiences with hospitals to feel wholly comfortable in this place. She has some expensive sunglasses on to hide her eyes from the blinding white glare. "Christ, is this place lit by the world's biggest fluorescent bulb?" she complains. She looks... ragged, to say the least. Sounds it too, but she carries on.

    Over by the shore, she draws her sabre and dips it into the liquid. Is it actually water, plastic, or something else entirely? She also aims a glower at George. "Don't fish. What if you pull up something like what came out of the portal? Oh, do you have /information/ to the contrary?"

    She looks along the tracks, and peers into the distance. "We took this trolley right? Could they... walk to other Zones?" That's a worrying thought, and with no Batter or Judge about, no answer. Eventually, considering this arrival point 'explored,' she moves along the path.
Thomas Alva Edison The land is quiet, the sloshing of the water is replaced with the sounds of shallow water moving.  The clouds are just that, clouds and not smog.  Edison takes in a deep breath and notices the lack of dirty air.  This...is different.  The very Zone itself seems...similar but off somehow.  He kneels down to take out a small vial and take a sample of the water, before dipping his fingers into it and rubbing them to try and compare it to what it was before.

"What is a relief?  We have barely seen this place, but at least it is...here," Edison says with some relief in his voice.  It /was/ still here, maybe just maybe he was wrong?  There was hope to cling onto, at least, and while he hated being wrong he was hoping he was.  He was hoping that he had just given in to doubt, or that his determinations were off due to the reality shaping thing the other member of the Flotilla had.  

"Yes...and maybe?  Let me see if I can get the Trolley working," Edison continues, first of all trying to see if, in fact, it was working.  If not, then he goes about trying to repair it or improve it to work.  
Yuuki Kuran A world of white. Searing, perfect white. Light, overpowering.

It's awful.

Clearly offput by the scenery in the way someone who was up far, far too late grumpily tries to turn away from the light pouring in from a bedside window.

But the window is 'everything', and the daylight is so offensively bright.

Taking in the sights, thus, for Yuuki, is hard. She navigates on feeling and scent, drifting hesitatingly while sniff-sniffing at the air and with both hands covering her eyes.

"Ah, Thomas, I'm just glad that things are quiet. That it's not so bad."

She shuffles over to George as she moves her scarf up around her eyes to tie around like an extra comfy winter blindfold, following the highly muted scent of his cigarettes. "Should we still expect the worst, George?"
Zero Kiryu "No," Zero says to George, "not really."

The disagreement is a soft one, because there is something preferable about this place to what these places were before. But on the other hand, a slate wiped clean is... something else entirely. As much as he reasoned that it might be better, he wouldn't call it a relief.

It just is.

As always, the hunter stands close to Yuuki Kuran. Presently he looks mildly out of sorts, but not in the usual way. It's more like he's a little tired from battling with a cold, or perhaps a flu-- but that he actually took care of it, and managed to come out on the tail end of it all not too long ago, and is collecting himself now.
nder the weather. Not in shambles. Or maybe it's just all the godawful bright light.

Could you describe this place as merely under the weather? Or is it just in shambles? What about the way that it was before? Zero supposes that it doesn't really matter. What's done is done.
Starbound Flotilla     George shrugs at Tina. "If we run into something that's out to kill us /now/? Well, that's on account of we stepps in its house, not the other way around." He says. "But, less cryptically? Definitely." Helpful. Janine gets a sort of placating gesture. "Kid, kid. This place is a little more raw than that. A little more unrefined and unconstrained. Especially now. Play its rules the way you play that forest, right about now. Closer things than you think."

    "Trust me, it's a relief." He assures Thomas. "Can't you feel it? There's so much less /suffering/ going on. The place /hurts/ less. Now, it's finally not trying to make as much sickness and pain as it can. Aaaaaaaall just..." He makes a distant gesture. "Pure, now. So," He winks to Yuuki. "Expect the best. Just, remember that we're not the best, so the world might have its own opinions."
Priscilla     The dark water is, in fact, water. It feels moderately cold to the touch, like the coldest setting of a tap, and is more or less crystal clear, only clouded with a little bit of powdered iron near the edges from where there is more of a shore than a sharp, vertical, metal wall. The strange colours of the Zone are washed out completely. The softer, grey path is exactly the shade that iron dust, without rust, should be, and the stark white, on closer examination, seems to be an effect of the diffused light of a very bright, very white, somewhere-sun, on extremely polished and perfectly flat steel or aluminium, albeit still strangely pale, possibly due to some alloy or another.

    The rails for the tram are dead. That means someone can walk on them without being electrocuted. Whether they ever were powered in the first place is possibly in doubt, however. It's entirely possible the tram ran on them just because they're rails and trams run on rails. Getting to go left at the station for the first time, you quickly just run into a dead end, rather than seeing a complete circuit. Taking the right again, the rails become a long, plodding walk in silence. An uneventful hike down a straight line, vanishing into the horizon, that had taken fifteen minutes before, but at least an hour at a casual pace.

    As before, the tram line arrives at Damien. Everything is in its proper place. It seems the world hasn't been destroyed, or radically altered much, save for the realism of its substance, with its clashing primary hues and bizarre choices of materials and nonsense occupations replaced with colder, more 'real' alternatives. The only thing further out of place is that the sign is backwards. Not spelled backwards, but mirrored.

    The handful of buildings outside the mines, where they always were, are of course, empty. Empty chairs sit around empty tables in empty rooms, with dimmer grey walls than the outside, and paler, softer lighting, from lamps that glow diffuse white instead of with any flame inside of them anymore. Once again, only small details are off, such as the appearance of a brand new chest that was never there previously, white and black as everything else. White and black as the Batter's uniform or Zacharie's getup.

    Even the mines are much brighter inside than they were before, without their clashing purple hue, dim and smoggy corridors, and lumps of waste metal that reek of sweat-slicked iron. The vents gushing breathable smoke into the atmosphere --to *make* the atmosphere-- are nowhere to be seen. It feels more like traveling down a series of winding hallways with indoor lighting more than anything else. The one thing without its colour gone is the odd, floating yellow cube of before, somehow unaffected, or untargeted, by whatever Purification is.

    It'd be uneventful here too, if you weren't able to hear the slow grinding of something like rough stone or hard clay over the metal, echoing down some halls, audibly roaming the corridors at a slow, prowling pace.

    You can hear the whispers of the Nothingness here. They leak in, as if trickling in from those sources of sound and blotting into the fabric of the place, in almost a creeping aura. The hushed muttering, babbled words, the overlapping "shhh"s, the briefly comprehensible snippets of a fraction of a question or statement, and the eerie sort of background noise behind them. The faintest echoes of someone banging on the inside of a door.
Tina Natsumi "Hah! Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen anyone all tha tpure. We must be outright messes compared to the whole..." Tina gestures vaguely at their surroundings. "... This place. All the whiteness and clean... Everythin'. Almost looks like you could eat offa the floor 'round here."

If she actually packed any food with her and received any donation incentives to do so, Tina probably would. Alas, she's probably not so lucky (or unlucky), and she continues along that long path to Damien with the others. She takes a brief detour to check out the chest because of course she does, even trying to tip the chest over to test its weight and suitability for bringing with her entirely.

"If those other beasties could just walk over, I imagine they'd have done it by now. All... 'Pure' and shit-spewin' against those folks that barely had their shit together? They wouldn't stand a chance!" Tina laughs in response to Janine, then pauses as she quickly realizes just how dark that might have sounded. "... Hmn. Maybe we should put those things down if we see 'em. Certainly sounds like there somethin' over there, though."

Those echoes don't bode well, and Tina fishes her cell phone out of her chest pocket to snap a quick picture of herself in order to summon the modestly large robot persona once more.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison does not openly refute George, he can't be sure of anything.  There was a lot of less of suffering.  He can't deny this, things were bright and clean, the water was water, and the sky had clouds.  He takes a deep sigh and returns to his work on the tram.  Only to find out there was no electricity, nothing powering it...which means he can't fix it.  This was something for the source, and he might need his powers for something later on.  

"Walking it is then.." he says, starting down the path.  "Yes, for once they are quiet.  However, is this because it is peaceful, or the calm before the storm?" Thomas, however, wants it to be the first.  However, as a man of science, he can not put his wants before reality.  He had to keep his eyes clear.

The trail leads them into the first stop, and he looks around.  Nothing, no people, none of the grey people who lived here in constant fear.  Edison looks towards the chest to open it, it wasn't here before, and he was curious to what was here now before he continued on with the group into the mines.

Even here was...bright.  This in and of itself was unusual, but then it was followed by the grinding sound and the echos of nothingness.  "Hm..."
Janine Liberi     Janine trudges along the tracks, looking furious that this is even necessary. She managed to entertain herself for a while by trying to balance on the dead track, but that's hard to do with just one arm for balancing. But eventually, they reach the little mining community, and no one is there. No sign of a massacre, just empty buildings, empty bright mines. Structures, but no function.

    As Tina begins messing with the chest, Janine rolls her eyes and strides over. "Chests are for opening!" she declares, jamming the blade of her sabre into the gap between the lid and box and trying to wrench it open.

    Down in the mines, they get no relief from the incessant brightness. "Ugh, I should have gotten better sunglasses," she complains, stepping over hunks of metal as they explore. "I expected this place to be a lot more hos-" She goes quiet, first catching the strange noise. "Did you all-okay, I'm not crazy then." She heads towards the source of noise, keeping her back to the walls and peeking around corners to find the source.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki does not 'see' the Pure zone, but her other senses are finely tuned. She feels out with invisible hands, experiencing the contours and corners of the Purified Zone they walk through with a feather-light kinetic brush. She doesn't see the colors, but she feels the surity of the surroundings, the cheanliness of the air rather than the thick yet oxygenated smoke, and most importantly...

"It doesn't smell like plastic at all. I remember the rain, more clearly than anyhting. The whole world felt artificial when we walked around it - fake in the way cheap Halloween costumes are fake, that scent that clings to you - rubbery and chemical."

Blindfold still up, she smiles to George. "I can't smell anyone, so I guess there's less suffering by default. Still... If you live only to suffer, it's arguable it's an upgrade. This always felt like some fantasy hell though. Fake, and cloistered, and entirely backwards."

"Like living in a purgatory designed to sustain you forever, maybe."
Zero Kiryu Zero stares at the back of Yuuki's head as she blindfolds herself and navigates by any number of her other senses that are usably sharp for this. It /is/ pretty annoying, but that's taking it a little far. Isn't it? He lays a hand on her shoulder and helps guide her insofar as it is necessary to do so.

"George mentioned that it was something like that before, but..."

"I don't know. Those people were bland and empty-smelling, but they were definitely still there. The Batter argued that the only way to help them was to follow through with his plan, and maybe that's true, but..."

"If his plan simply wipes them out, that is unverifiable, and the 'Pure' creature that we encountered wasn't meaningfully distinct from a Specter in terms of the way that it behaved or degree of hostility. It was simply much, much stronger and aligned along a different axis." He concludes, dully.
Starbound Flotilla     "Oh, pure types wouldn't go somewhere that's impure. Not without, you know..." George gestures distantly. "Certain kinds of motivation and handling. Ahh, shit-- spoilers. Forget I said that." He heads on, pushing forward to chatter while the group moves on, through familiar landscapes and towards unfamiliar sounds.

    "Well, all the proper people moved on out. The Judge, Zach, folks like that move on. As for Elsen? Eh, you'll still see him around Zone 3, and who knows where else he gets to." He shakes his head, sadly. "Don't think about it like that. This place was a torture chamber. A place where Elsen and Dedan could only go through pain, y'know? If you break the torture chamber and spill all the corpse out that it was holding onto this mortal coil here, isn't that a good thing? And besides..."

    "Elsen isn't wiped out. Guy's still just as alive now as he was before."
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki patpats Zero's guiding hand, nodding along at his commentary. "There was something different. The Pure smelled buch better than the Spectres. The people before, they didn't even really have blood at all, it was thin... And the burnt was like smelling disgusting chemical spills that were lit on fire."

As she talks and walks, light lavender butterflies begin to flutter around, seemingly coming from nowhere (or Yuuki's wake) to rather dopily settle on each member of the group.

Zero acquires one on his shoulder, George gets a rather ticklish one on his nose, Thomas gets one balanced on his BIG LION DADDY PAULDRON, Tina and Janine get ones that rest innocently atop their heads. Others just float about, bumping into the stone walls or settling on surfaces before flapping about lazily again.

George engages in SPOILERS.

"O-oh. You know, if you know the plot, you don't have to give it all away. But if the 'real people' moved on, then I guess there's nothing to worry about."

"Is that why the people felt so thin-spread?"
Starbound Flotilla     George rips off an extremely tiny piece of one of his cigarettes, rolling it incredibly tightly, and carefully threading it through the curl of the proboscis of the butterfly that landed on his nose. As he does, he speaks quite casually to Yuuki. "Which people? Little J and Zack attack were pretty well all there, plus the Guardians, least if you ask me." It's likely he knows just what she meant, but is being obtuse for a particular reason.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison looks towards George for a moment, squinting his eyes at him.  The look in his eyes isn't really much beyond he's trying to piece together what was just spilled in front of them and then go back with everything they learned.  

"Are the Elsens just...one person spread out over multiple people?"  A butterfly lands on his shoulder pads.  Huh!
Zero Kiryu "I'd really..." Zero glances towards the Unnecessary Butterfly on his shoulder, present he assumes because Yuuki Just Felt Like It to the need to keep track of everyone else, "... prefer it if you wouldn't tamper with the sort of narrative manipulation that Moonfin was engaged in. It adds a layer of complication that I don't like thinking about, and I already need to think about it since one of you used it to start with."

"... And please be cautious about what you do to those butterflies." He adds grumpily, securing a firmer grip on Yuuki's shoulder Just In Case.
Tina Natsumi Tina sputters lightly when Janine just up and sticks her sword right into the chest. "Easy! Dang, Liberi. I thought you woulda known that peekin' in a chest needs a little more finesse than that." Laughing at her own joke, the blonde turns her gaze upwards at those butterflies appearing at of nowhere. She chuckles lightly at the one landing on their heads, reaching up to give hers a light poke before listening to Zero.

His observation of the unobserved effects of the purification have Tina humming softly to herself in thought. "It'd take us havin' eyes on a non-purified Zone to know what really happens to these folks when we do the purifyin', then. I mean... It'd be pretty easy to guess that they could be movin' out or they could even be gettin'... Er." She mimics an explosion badly, throwing her arms out to her sides in an exaggerated motion. "... But yer right in that science-y sense." She taps her chin lightly for a moment, then snaps her fingers. "Hey. What if we have ol' Strangey open one of those portals the next time we're about to do some purifyin'? Then we can see for sure!"

Grinning broadly at her own suggestion, Tina flashes another smirk in George's direction before tut-tutting at him dramatically. "Hey now. You tryin' to get me demonetized?" A beat, and then she furrows her brow. "Although... Hn. If we did get another portal goin' just before purification, that could lead to even more of those weird baby things showin' up where they shouldn't be."
Yuuki Kuran George uses his PAPERCRAFT skill to fashion a MINI MECICINAL HERB CIGARETTE.

For a fake butterfly.

To get medically high on.

George feels like one of his Secret Objectives completed, off in the corner of his mind.

MEANWHILE

"Wait. Wait wait wait. ElsenS, or ElseN? I'm sorry, I'm feeling slow today." Yuuki offers, as Thomas catches the same thing.

Then she realizes. "Wait wait wait. Don't tell us. You're spoiling. And yes, please don't tamper too much with the narrative. Moonfin, even if he's an enemy right now, is one of the most careful and deliberate people I know. So even if it was used against us, I trust it was for a good reason."
Starbound Flotilla     "Huh? Nah, don't worry. That's what I promised. I promised the Chorus, hey, you Purify Zone 2's guardian, I'll tell you three words to fix some grammar problems you've had. See, not really bad to course-correct you on this, seeing as you got a little off-course on your own. You heard 'Elsen' and you figured, hey, that means those guys in the ties, with no hair, and box heads." George says, shifting the butterfly to his own shoulder. "But you got it a bit wrong."

    "'Elsen' isn't a caste, or an ethnicity, or a job, or anything like that. It's not plural. The three-word fix for all your woes I had to tell you was, 'Elsen is singular'. Think about it. Guy like that wants safety, wants someone to protect him, wants someone to tell him what to do. Most of the most of all, though, he doesn't wanna die. So how's this fine wonderful little world treat him, when it's figuring out Elsen's own personal torture?"

    He gestures around, eyes shut relaxedly, grinning as if the world itself had validated him, and shrugging as if he doesn't even care that it did. "The kind of way that anyone in their right mind would want to stop. At least, if you ask me and my mind-rightness."
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki looks surprised, though with her eyes hidden by a blindfold, it's more the furrow of her brow and the 'huh'-ing 'o' of her mouth.

"S-so when you said 'three words', it wasn't..."

Yuuki is shocked in the way that only a romance novel protagonist can be shocked at something this pointlessly mundane.

"I thought you meant another three words. I don't know why, in retrospect, but..."
Zero Kiryu "This isn't Cross Academy, Yuuki." Zero cuts in, his expression flat and somewhere ambiguously between entertained and annoyed. The annoyance may be aimed at George's AMBROSIA cigarettes, though.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison frowns...so that is the case.  Elsen is one person...and this land is his torture.  Thinking about this a bit more, he crosses his arms and sighs.  "When the zone is pure, the Elsen is gone then...what happens then when all of the zones are pure?  What happens to him then?"

Edison isn't sure about this, but there is an understanding.  Releasing a man from suffering is a kind act, no matter how you slice it.  This then makes sense why George, who knows things, is helping them.  Still, there is something else missing from the formula.

"If...the queen is in charge of this place, then is her job to continue the suffering of Elsen?"
Priscilla     Fiddling with the chest, Tina finds that it is stuck to the floor. Like, bolted down or something. It's not coming off. It'd be easier to carve into the solid metal, even. Janine just crowbars it open with a sword, in what is probably an unnecessary level of force, and discovers a Golden Flesh. There goes the theory that the Elsens keep these around for themselves. This thing . . . materialized or something? After they'd gone. Or maybe one dragged one out at the last minute and . . . stuck it to the floor?

    Chasing down the source of the slow, roving grinding, is best done with an equal level of speed and greater caution. The mine tunnels are 'indoor bright', so it's not much viable to sneak in plain sight, but there are plenty of corners, and even without playing hot-cold with the aura of steadily intensifying Nothingness-leakage and eerie noises, the echoes of the grinding themselves are easy enough to track.

    It brings them to --from the rear, at least-- *those* things. The warped, monochrome, shitty dot matrix printer-looking giant infant things. Misshapen, crudely sketched babies or toddlers with a variety of uniquely strange deformations and odd patterns. No two of them are exactly alike, each displaying their own esoteric symbology. One looks like someone has put jotted lines over its body to delineate cuts of meat, while another has incredibly dense, recursive tattooing all over its eyeless face, and the third of them looks as if its skull is trying to reveal itself through the front of its face, emblazoned obtusely with a giant numeral 1.

    The feeling of Otherness about them is incredibly intense at close range. The aura about them doesn't feel so much like being close to the Nothingness, but as something that is made of the same stuff, though oppressively hostile rather than simply loudly secretive. Something that doesn't belong in any Zone, Pure or Impure. The 'Secretaries'. Whatever that revealed name is supposed to mean. Not Spectre. Not Elsen. Not Guardian. Not human. Not whatever the Batter is. 'Diabolical humanoid spirits'. The descriptor feels appropriate. The whispering has grown harsh, loud, and malicious, feeling as if it is spitting insults and threats to those closest, without quite being intelligible.

    The three of them wander as a pack, as if searching for something. Hoping to ambush it in the tunnels, no doubt. The whiteness dimps temporarily where they roam.
Janine Liberi     Ah shit, three of them.

    Janine reports back and delivers the bad news. One of these took a team effort. Three, with a smaller team? No way can they take them straight. So the only option is to ambush them, try to bring them down before the fight can really begin.

    Janine picks up a small hunk of metal and tosses it at an intersection. It makes a clatter, hopefully drawing one of them close. She's aiming for the one whose skull is showing, but she'll take any of them as long as she can get one alone. She then, very quietly, summons Biancabella, and compells winds to push her up the walls of the mine so she can awkwardly brace herself between two narrow points in the tunnels. It's an awkward fit, and she can't hold it for long.

    But ideally, she holds it long enough that one of the Secretaries is right underneath her. She then releases her grip and drops down on them, aiming a vicious swipe at the back of their necks. If not a full decapitation, she hopes to sever whatever they have akin to a spinal cord!
Thomas Alva Edison Edison sucks in a breath at the three pure monsters that are hunting for them.  Though they seem not to have noticed them yet, which means an ambush would be the best call.  After all, it took everything in the tank to drop one of these things.  Closing his eyes, he can ask for more answers later, right now...this.

Janine drops on them, and Edison puts his own plan into motion.  Turning a corner he readies both fists, before releasing a blast of electricity at the tattooed one, aiming to try and fry him before he can muster a defense or attack on Janine.

Already Edison is considering other options, this is not a good time, and right now he wonders if they can even beat back three of them.  Not for lack of trying, but rather due to whatever otherworldliness they bring with them, and this seemingly being on their home turf is...just bad news.  Still...if push comes to shove, there was still W.F.D.
Tina Natsumi Following Janine's lead, Tina moves to try and get Meatlines separated from the trio as well.

The method: Finding a corner and planting her hat on Uncle Sam's head. When Meatlines doesn't look like it can see Tina nor the Persona, Uncle Sam fires a shot at the ceiling before withdrawing back to Tina, leaving the hat fluttering down to the ground as the likely source of the noise!

Of course, Tina's not so crazy as to leave herself without the Persona around. Backing away from around the corner, Tina re-summons the large robot behind her this time, poised to just start pounding the crap out of Meatlines should it approach the mysterious ceiling-dropped hat.

She's really hoping it takes the bait. Otherwise, standing there would just be... Awkward.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki taps her chin, her breath smoked lightly with barely perceptible amounts of medical herbs, doubly imperceptible in the clime of the Purified land which suppresses the smoke straight from the source.

"They don't feel... good." She whispers, to the party.

Stalking the stalkers is something Yuuki is decent at, though it's good that the group contains moody teenagers adept and adroit at skulking around.

"Ah, Zero and I will take whichever you don't. Right, Zero?"

With a hint of burnt medicine curling from her nose, Yuuki asks George a simple question.

"Those things don't really belong here, do they?"
Starbound Flotilla     "Queen's the one who sent the Guardians, and she's... well, part of that whole cycle of imppurity. She's not tryin' to make Elsen's life hell. But it's part of what she does. As for when all the zones are pure, you get to stop this from ever happening again, is what happens." George answers Thomas, with a surprisingly friendly look. He even puts a hand on his shoulder. "So, promise me you'll make the right choice, huh?" He doesn't wait for the promise.

    Three of these things. Dammit. George moves into cover fast. He answers Yuuki: "You heard the Batter before. 'Born from the faithless.' Gotta admit I don't know the exact science of it, for, you know, obvious reasons. But there's a good reason you need to be a certain kind of pious to hack it around these zones post-purity." He's pretty scared of these things. "Well, I was thinking stealthy, but stealthy-murder's a kind of stealthy, and who am I to get in the way of this kind of business?" He admits under his breath as he dons his armor in a flicker of light.

    He's not eager to get in melee, but with these things wielding powers of an assortment of cryptography, he has to take the risk that being at a distance is just as bad as being close, which means closing in with a hefty gas-valve bomb he's prepped for this sort of encounter and trying to plant it on whichever one has been rendered most vulnerable to a leap-upon tactic.
Zero Kiryu "If you like," Zero grants to Yuuki with a faint shrug, "but I'm not at my best at the moment. I don't think I'll be able to help as much as I did the last time we fought the one. I'm still getting used to some of this."

For this reason, the hunter doesn't enter the battle proactively like the others do.

With regards to George's expectations he shrugs, "At this point, if it was the wrong decision then the damage is sufficiently done that there's no real undoing it. I'm not going to promise to keep doing it if we find that it's a mistake for some reason, but..."

"I don't really have a personal stake in this." He admits.
Priscilla     Thomas, and George, were right to be leery about this idea. Though it's granted that the first time they'd encountered a Secretary, it'd been in the middle of a battle where they'd already beaten on each other quite hard already, and something about what Strange did had angered it, three at a time, especially with a smaller group and no Batter, is quickly proven to be a *tall* order.

    They aren't very smart, or . . . not very . . . lucid? They quickly respond to the thrown rocks and ceiling shots in a sort of semi-mechanical daze, sliding around in different directions without really walking, grinding their stubby feet over the floor like moving statues. It splits them up perfectly fine, around different corners so they don't all have line of sight to any one target.

    It's that dealing with them individually, while stretched so thin, is still a huge problem. Janine drops right on one, cleaves into its neck, and finds it hard as a goddamn rock, not even slightly matching up with the gross fleshy baby neck it resembles. The wound barely trickles, having bitten an inch deep, albeit fairly long. It turns on her immediately, swiveling around to face without moving its legs, and letting rip one of those awful, grainy, badly compressed screeches, before blasting the corridor with streaking lines of mathematical function, both extremely powerful as physical attacks, and punching the brain, provoking random assortments of disorientation, loss of motor or speech control, and/or wildly out of control gut emotions of a supremely negative bent.

    Thomas blasts his own and finds that it doesn't even marshal a defense, soaking up the scorching electricity that crawls across its body as it inexorably slides towards him. It screeches, loud and compressed and crackly, and blasts him right back, chasing him down slowly like a pac man ghost with an awful, awful ranged attack. Tina's third chosen Secretary takes the bait as well, and engages in melee combat instead, smashing the giant infant around several times, rocking it back and forth on its pudy feet and crashing it into several walls, which buys her a short period of momentum. After a few more punches, it abruptly *snaps* back to face her, like a misplaced animation keyframe, immediately surrounding Uncle Sam in a cage of crisscrossing mathematical value lines and collapsing them on top of him with the sound of a roaring paper shredder.

    George finds Janine's the least attentive towards him. He plants the bomb on its back, and the ensuing explosion, contained and intensified in the cramped tunnel, flattens it on its face, filling the area with intense fire and gas fume smoke. He can see it, and its spiderwebbed and cratered back, begin to slowly hover back upright again like some awful game that ends with -simulator, before the smog clouds it out. Judging by the lack of counterattack, it doesn't seem to be able to find him.
Zero Kiryu There they go.

Zero considers his options. Going in close in his current exhaustion probably wouldn't be a good idea. It's best to help with the confusion and occluding that people seem to be preferring, and that's definitely something that he can do. He follows George's blip on his mental radar, shutting his eyes in imitation of Yuuki's own decision to put out the obnoxious brightness the whole place has.

He extends a hand to the tunnel wall. Vines wind their way out of his wrist, emerging seamlessly -- almost 'melting' -- from the substance of his skin and beginning to creep their way down. It doesn't take long for the creeping vines to expand outwards into more of an ambulatory jungle, small trees sprouting inexplicably among the brambles winding their way down the tunnel.

The growth stops pushing outward as it grows nominally proximal to George and Janine, spreading wide across the surrounding space so that it is thick with brush. A faint powder begins to fall surrounding George and Janine's Secretary-- the plants are going out of their way to spare the two, but...

If they should happen to get a little on them in passing, they'll discover that what the plants are putting off are some sort of incredibly intense relaxant. In small doses it's sort of nice, but in the doses it's actually trying to pour onto the Secretary, it would make you do things like 'just not care how unpleasant the situation is, no matter how unpleasant that may be'. For instance, if a bunch of people were trying to murder you in a tunnel.

"This is..."

"Strange." Zero asides to Yuuki, a little uncomfortably.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison turns back towards George, "Of course.  I promise that I will."

The blast hits Edison square in the chest, bracing against it like a barrel-chested lion man, but he FELT that.  Staggering from the blow he falls to a knee and looks up as the thing approaches him.  This was going to be a hard fight, it was going to be an uphill battle the entire time.  He tries to think of a plan, but there is only one he can do now.

He calls for a plan, and then runs right at the creature, aiming to literally try and TACKLE it back and start pushing everything he has to try and push them closer together.  They and he had to be close to each other.  Then, he hoped what would come next could be done to take them down.  

Edison mixes in some punches with the tackle, trying to find some sort of purchase on the creature, trying to soften it up for what was about to come.
Tina Natsumi Tina's good at beating up giant babies! Who knew. That's what she's thinking up until it abruptly locks onto her, anyway, forcing the streamer to back up and whip out her trusty revolver as Uncle Sam draws out a shotgun. Before either of those guns can fire, however, the cage of lines closes in on the Persona!

As resilient as Uncle Sam is, that rush of disorientation and a portion of that physical pressure are still enough to take the Persona-user right off her feet. The robot still struggles valiantly, however, holding its ground against the cage to keep it from closing in entirely even as Tina utters incoherent noises and only vaguely understands the words being spoken over the radio.

She doesn't quite understand the plan itself, but it's better than trying to power her way through. Withdrawing Uncle Sam back into her head once more, Tina begins her rapid retreat to try and rejoin the rest of the group, all while taking potshots back at Meatlines to try and hold that Secretary's attention!
Janine Liberi     Sneak attack bitch! That's what Janine would say if it had done what she hoped. Part of her is honestly relieved that she doesn't bet baby viscera on her, but that part is quickly quashed as the Secretary turns its attention to her. "Fuck!" she shouts, remembering how much those mathematical beams hurt. Biancabella pushes her over the Secretary's head to safety, but those beams lance through the Persona, and Janine cries out through the empathetic link.

    She then cries out again as George's bomb catches her mid-arc and launches her into a wall. "You FUCKER!" she shouts, struggling to get back to her feet. "Couldn't you have bombed a leg to bring it down or something? Or were you TRYING to kill me as well?! I bet you were, you- you..." It is at that point that Zero's soporific pollen kicks in, and she slumps against a wall. Janine, as it turns out, is a spacey drunk.

    "Huh? Get 'em together? Oh, sure," she says in response to Edison's call on the radio. Biancabella comes out, mostly. It's form is blue and indistinct, but it still conjures up a gale-force wind to try and push the Secretary down the tunnel towards the one Edison is pummelling.
Starbound Flotilla     Thank christ it can't see him. Even George, tuned in as he may be to The Spoilers, doesn't know even a few of the minutiae of the biology of these things and didn't know they wouldn't be able to see him. Janine will only get a good chance to see him when she finds him swinging around the Secretaries, trying to help her out with enacting Edison's plan. He's got a grappling hook! He's trying to help tangle the things together, since they're not lucid enough to de-tangle, and because he strongly suspects Edison is going to do something condictive.

    "No no!" He calls out to Janine. "I'm not trying to kill ya with the bombs! Listen, here-- you can tell I'm trying to kill you with a bomb if I say the first half of something cool to /you/, and then the bomb happens. I also say the second half, but you don't get to hear it, 'cause of bombs and hearing loss and all." Even in the middle of this, christ. Well, he's doing his best to exploit the smog, at least, to help out with the plan in less... destructive ways. Or ways, at least, that might give him a head start if this battle turns sour and he needs to flee.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki being flatfooted in this situation - incapable of seeing people's readiness - is a huge reason why she's basically completely useless in the surprise round. She barely gets out an 'ok, ready!' quietly before people are already leaping on the weird empty Nothingness-flavored blank spots in her remaining 5 senses.

Zero, additionally, causes the princess to slow up, feeling the familiar presence of Bloody Rose without the scent of the gunmetal and the distant twinges of grease and gunpowder.

"It's not strange. It's just new. But it's also you. Something that you're not used to, right? Just take it easy. I'll ha-"

She can't say 'I'll handle everything' because she's a blindfolded retard and already wasting time.

"I'll go help George and Janine. Stick back with Tina, ok? And try to get used to them!"

Then she jogs off, getting a leg-pumping running start before hopping up and driving both heels forward into George & Janine's bombed, math-shooting Secretary.

It's a bit samey but sometimes dropkicking thing while blindfolded is for the best. Swinging around a killer scythe without seeing what you're doing is dangerous!
Priscilla     Thomas tackles a Secretary head on. He sort of did it before. It's a little easier than then since he isn't thoroughly winded from battle already, and it's a smaller specimen, but it's still like grinding a stone statue bigger than he is across a metal floor. His punches land with dull, hard thuds, visibly causing it some kind of burbling displeasure, where he gets it all the way to Janine's and George's mark, before it flails its pudgy, misshapen, monochrome baby fist at him, and hits hard enough to put him a foot into the wall at the end of the hall behind him.

    Biancabella and George cooperate to increase the CMB roll with pressurized wind (nicely directed in these cramped, linear quarters) and grappling hook shenanigans, slowly driving and pulling the one on Janine back towards Edison's choice. It rips off a second, and third, badly compressed and mixed audio bite of a hysteric woman's screaming, and explodes grids of logarithmic chains all around itself, liable to skewer a dozen intangible beams through the three of them (including Yuuki's, as her dropkick slams it back to back with the other), and hammer them with a barrage of dizziness, sickness, wild adrenaline-soaked anger, hallucinatory confusion, irrational paranoia, and a barrage of other overwhelming brain malfunctions (on top of burning the shit out of them with advanced math, somehow).

    Tina elects to run away from hers. This . . . works very easily, actually. The Secretary screeches after her, but doesn't move any further than its slow, grinding pace from before, chasing her more like the shambling kind of zombie rather than the sprinting kind. Rejoining the rest of the group entail getting a great big Converted Scalar beam through the chest region, quite capable of dropping her on the spot, but also results in the third and last Secretary joining the bunch.

    All in the same general area, they're 'trapped' between Bloody Rose's vines. It's unclear whether they'd actually break out by force or not, though it doesn't really matter when all that soporific dust joins in with the swirl of smoke from various sources. While the Secretaries mill about blindly in search of their targets in the smoke cover, they eventually, gradually, grind to a halt, and then just . . . stand there. Staring creepily off into space, like badly sculpted and painted paper mache art pieces, not seeming to fall asleep or express any kind of emotion or level of care, but reduced to a state of total passivity. So long as nobody crosses the vines, they don't even bother to attack anyone walking past.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison fights with everything he can, but it's not as bad as the first time.  Thankfully, because of the fact that they are far fresher, and not literally on their last legs fighting each other.  They are moving them...they are managing it!

They are almost together...and then the fist comes down in a powerful babby swing.  Edison tries to block, thinking he just had to keep it together for a moment.  Seconds later, Edison is flying down the hallway at an incredible clip.

He slams into the end of the hallway a moment later, his arm crushed from the punch and his body smashed terribly from the force of the shot.  He coughs up blood and staggers from the blow.  Slowly, pulling himself out of the cat-sized hole he stumbles forward, punch drunk.  

"Did...anyone get the name...of the license plate of that baby stroller..."
Tina Natsumi Success! Tina's looking rather pleased with herself as she kites Secretary Meatlines back to the rest of the group, bobbing back and forth every now and then to make sure it doesn't get distracted or do nothing but shoot awful math lasers at her. There's quite a few close calls by the time she gets it back there, but after the last time she took one of those lasers through the chest?

Tina's /much/ more careful not to take a shot head on this time. Still, she's looking winded and thoroughly pooped by the time it's gathered up with the others, and her usual vigor is replaced with a slumping-against-the-wall of very low vigor.

"Nnghuh. That ain't... Remind me never to do that kinda shit again 'less we need it." She still manages to force out an odd laugh, but that's more for appearances than anything else. "Looks like... They're stoppin' though? Uh. What do we do with 'em now?"
Janine Liberi     Janine meanders over to the trio of Secretaries, rendered eternally passive by the barrier of rose vines. "Hahah, it's almost like a fairy tale. Someone want to give them a kiss to wake them up?" Yeah she's still out of it. She gives everyone a round of applause, but given her condition, she just kind of slaps her thigh with her one hand, which doesn't really convey the praise.

    She looks to George and offers him a wobby smile. "Oh, it's okay if you wanted to. Sometimes I want to kill me too! Especially now that August made me homeless." Dark, but she blows past it.

    "Well, let's keep going! Maybe something will be at the entrance. That's how backtracking works, right?" And with that, she begins limping out of the mines again, heading for the 'start' of Zone 1.
Zero Kiryu Zero feels the pollen making contact, and he knows -- he doesn't know how, but he knows -- that it snagged something. Then, several somethings. He doesn't dare to go look at first, because he wants nothing to do with that fight right now... and those vines no longer belong to Bloody Rose. It's all him. Or rather, it's just him. Which has its upsides, but has been incredibly weird to try to figure out.

It strikes him a moment later that there were too many 'hits' for the targets to solely be the enemy. Who else had gotten caught in the soporific? Well...

He still feels all of them moving, so it's probably not worth worrying about.

Once the noise dies down a little, the hunter does come strolling back, using Yuuki as a marker to follow. He allows the jungle to grow farther in his direction, to make more of a kill corridor that will need to be navigated in order for the Secretaries to reach anyone at the end of it.

It's only then that he realizes who took the hit that shouldn't-- Janine. Though his eyes are closed, Zero's head twitches in her direction.

"Sorry. Still getting used to some of this." He asides to Janine.

Then, to Yuuki, "'Different.' My body couldn't do something like this before. It hurt when i tried. And sometimes, it did try, at the beginning. The walk back to fight that guy was unpleasant."
Starbound Flotilla     George eats some modest amounts of shit from logarithmic chains. But, unlike Moonfin, he's not focused entirely on single-target dueling, and so he can deal much more with battles that aren't one-on-one; he's not KOed instantly, and can roll with the shots. Dizziness, sickness, irrational anger, paranoia, confusion, and general brain malfunction? That's just getting old!

    Too bad being used to such things doesn't give George a resistance to it. He's knocked back and has to spend quite a bit of time mentally recovering while he reconciles his role in things with the compulsions and impulses shooting through his brain while the pain of the burns shoots through his body.

    Despite the urge to shout, or to swear, or to start getting accusing at people, once the battle's done he seems much more inclined to just take it mostly easy. He speaks to Tina. "We abandon 'em. Remember? That's what they said before. It's kinda how this works." He rubs his head, as if working the pain out of a muscle. "Something at the entrance... Hahaha. Well, if you're really wantin' to find /somethin'/."
Yuuki Kuran Getting up from the ground as Bloody Rose's -- rather, Zero's -- vines encapture and enrapture the trio of hard-pressed Secretaries into a state of physical and mental stasis. However, it also mildly inconveniences the group - soporifically hitting Thomas and Janine as well. Which leaves things thusly:

Zero is feeling trashy, George is being cryptic and advising leavng, Tina 'feels' ready to be done, and Janine and Thomas are loopy.

"Well... That's OK with me. We've kind of explored here enough. But, George - wouldn't it be better to kill them? We can. Here!"

Yuuki draws Artemis out, leaving it in baton form as she holds it out vaguely in George's direction (it's a little off to the right). "Just hit them with this until they die."